


fell down on my knees (i went to the crossroad)

by shedreamss



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Gen, Magical Realism, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-11
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-10-17 18:34:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10599762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shedreamss/pseuds/shedreamss
Summary: Everyone knows that myths aren't real.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this in like an hour and didn't edit it, but if i didn't post it now, it'll probably never get posted.   
> if this is about you, or someone you know, or you think it'll make you uncomfortable, here's a tip: don't read it.  
> title is from Robert Johnson's Cross Road Blues, bc subtlety is for losers.

You try to remember the first time you heard someone say the words “generational player.” You can’t. You try to remember the first time you heard someone say them about you.

(Maybe you heard whispers of it at 11, hushed and only when you were supposed to be out of earshot. Maybe it was the first time Bobby came to one of your games. Maybe it was the first time you shook hands with Gretzky - at the very least, that’s what solidified everything for you, when you realized. Maybe it was petitioning for exceptional status. Or, maybe it was the draft.)

It’s one of the media’s many sayings. The maxims they repeat in each and every broadcast and article and tweet that do the work of separating you from everyone else. Separating you from the player.

_Generational talent_ , they say,

_The next Great One,_

_The best in the league._

You want to say, “I’m just a guy. I’m good at hockey, but I’m just a guy.”

Except for how you’re not, not anymore,

In the same way that Gretzky isn’t just a guy. He’s not even just a hockey player. He stopped being his own person at some point between the Edmonton and Los Angeles, between being christened “The Great One” and when they retired his jersey league wide. Wayne Gretzky the man hasn’t been real - real in the way that ordinary people are real - for a very long time. (You could tell, too. You felt it when you looked him in the eye and shook his hand. He was, in equal measures, a hollowed out version of a man and a something that occupied almost too much space in the room, his energy or his something too much for the mere human form to contain. You tried to write it off as hero worship, but even then you knew it wasn’t that.)

You’ve known for a while now that the same thing is happening to you, realized when they didn’t call the draft lottery the draft lottery - in 2015, the draft wasn’t the NHL Draft Lottery, it was the Connor McDavid Lottery - argued and theorized that it was rigged when Edmonton won. (Like you are something to be bought, bargained for, a pawn in Gary Bettman’s dreadful plans to keep a failing business alive and running. Not like you are a living man; not like you were a boy.)

You think it probably started before then, though.

It felt like you were giving something up. Nothing tangible; more a part of yourself that you didn’t realize you even had let alone the ability to give it up. There was a helpless anxiety boiling in your stomach, more than just the usual acid and butterflies. Like you, yourself were giving something up to go first overall, for Edmonton to win the lottery.

(You don’t remember ever doing that. You think you’d remember making that kind of compromise. Bargains like that have consequences, a weight and a gravity to them. What’s more, you know how deals like that work; theoretically at least.)

Sometimes you feel a hunger, a growing discontent, like no measure of success will be sufficient. They say you’re one of the best -- in the league, playing now, of all time. Some say you’re the best. It’s only gotten bigger since the draft lottery. As time passes, you grow surer still that you did actually make a deal. Maybe you’ve forgotten, or maybe you just weren’t aware of it at the time, but a deal is a deal, no matter if it’s not a deal you set out to make.

If you did make a deal, you wonder what the terms were. (You don’t really need to wonder, you know, only it’s easier to pretend the opposite. You felt the growing discontent, that hunger despite your successes, and knew in with an unnatural surety that nothing would be enough. Something, _someone_ (and you have your suspicions) gambled on your soul that you would never be satisfied, never be truly happy, and the moment you were, your soul was not your own anymore.)

You wonder if this means that you die when you win the Cup.

  
You wonder if you care.

**Author's Note:**

> cool cool. thanks for reading; let me know what u think if u want. i'm on [tumblr](http://hail-sagann.tumblr.com), if that's your sort of thing


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